You generally have to sit a lot of hours in a treestand before you get a chance to see a truly spectacular buck within bow range. Before this morning, it happened once to me, when I didn’t have a tag for a buck. On that morning, I watched as the monster pawed and dug up the ground on a little hillock in front of me. After a good 10 minutes, he finally meandered slowly over to my tree, looked directly up at me, and sauntering slowly into the forest behind me.
I wasn’t expecting another chance this morning. When it happened, my lack of good preparation of shooting lanes from my stand forced me into a difficult ethical decision regarding the shot I was presented with.
It started soon after sunrise – maybe 45 minutes or so into shooting light. I’d rattled a few times, but hadn’t seen anything yet. I hear the casual rustle of a deer behind me, and slowly crane my neck around the tree to see what it was. A buck who was probably a 2 year old is back there, sniffing through the leaf litter on the forest floor.
A short rattle brings his head up, and gets him headed across the creek over toward me. He isn’t an animal I’m going to shoot, but I’m hoping I can get him headed up the hill toward my brother-in-law, who is looking only for meat, and isn’t going to be picky about antlers. Luckily, he points himself up the right path, and I’m able to drop a line to give him a casual little spook up that trail.
I sit and wait, expecting to hear the twang of an arrow soon, but am disappointed when the young fella’ spook out of the hedgerow and into the meadow in front of me. A nice try, I think, but we missed out chance at that one. But watching him looking back over his shoulder into the hedgerow, there’s something different about the way he spooked out. He’s watching something intently, but if he’s seeing a person, he’d be runnin’.
I’m wondering if it might be another buck that spooked him out, when movement a little higher up the hedgerow catches my eye. Stepping slowly but deliberately toward the young buck is a magnificent animal about twice his size. His swollen neck was in perfect proportion to the huge basket of antlers he carries like a crown on his head. The mahogany colored antlers sport at least 6 points on a side, though I didn’t really do a detailed analysis. The upright prongs are long and deadly.
The young fella wants no part of this big boy, and they both know it. After assuring the young guy is headed safely away from his territory, the big boy slowly starts to move across the open field. This action has all taken place about 50 yards in front of me.
I’m not sure what happened back there in the hedgerow, but my intuition tells me that this big boy had been attracted to the rattlin’ that I’d been doing, and was slowly making his way down toward the sound. I’ve seen this happen before, where the big boys approach a rattle like a grey ghost, staying silent and hidden until they get a good look at who’s sparring. I suspect the big ones let the battle play out, then move in to chase off both the victor and the defeated – both of whom are likely worn out by the battle they just played out.
In either case, I know I’m glad this big guy decided that the young fella was the source of the noise, and had come out into the open. Now that I had him out, I want to see if I can get him over to me and into one of my shooting lanes. I’m cursing silently to myself that I didn’t do a better job of clearing lanes.
I give a short, rapid rattle. His head snaps back toward me immediately. I realize immediately that I was probably too hasty, as he’s now approaching me from my most visible angle, making it hard to pull a draw on him unless he turns away from me. To make matters worse, the breeze is blowing right across me and toward him. It would have been smarter to let him get across the field before I rattled, so his approach to me would have given him less advantage than he now has. Too late – write this one down in the lesson book. Patience, grasshopper…
He saunters toward me with that “cock of the walk†embodiment of pure strength and grace that only a massive whitetail buck can display. I’m sitting dead still, avoiding a direct stare into his eyes as he stares directly at me while approaching to find the source of the rattle he’d just heard. At about 30 yards, he stops to evaluate. If he’ll only look away for a minute, I can draw and be ready for him. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, he starts his walk again, stopping at 25 yards and presenting a perfect broadside shot to me. But I can’t get a draw on him while he’s staring directly at me.
I wait, and he walks out of the shooting lane and behind some brush. Rapidly but silently, I draw and aim at his form moving behind the brush. Rather than walking into the next lane, he detours a bit, and decides to rub up a small sapling. I’ve been holding this draw for long enough that my arms and shoulders ache, so I let down to wait.
Four times I draw on him as he moves around in the brush beneath me, and four times I let down as he stays out of the shooting lanes. There are two lanes that I should have cleared, and had I done so, I’d be planning a trip to my taxidermist. Few things in life bring the bitter taste of regret to a hunter’s heart as much as holding a draw on the animal of a lifetime as he moves behind some twigs that should have been cleared in preparation for the hunt.
A couple times he stops behind sparse vegetation, and I can easily loose the arrow. There’s a good chance the arrow will clear through the twigs and make a good hit where I’m aiming. There’s also a better than fair chance it will glance off one of the twigs, and result in a poor shot.
I hold and wait. It’s the right decision – the ethical decision – and the one that stings the most.
He eventually catches a big enough snootful of my scent that he decides this is not the spot for him, and trots off. I try rattling again, but am unable to get him to reconsider. He’s seen what he needs to see, and doesn’t like it.
My curses are aimed at my laziness in not clearing shooting lanes well enough, and they aren’t quite as silent as they were a few minutes ago. I spend an hour in the late morning doing the work I should have done when I set the stand up, clearing the lanes properly. Like a penance that helps focus thought and reflection on the deed that earned the penance, I use the work to drive home the need to be more meticulous in my preparation in the future.
While I’m upset with myself for making such a novice mistake, I’m also grateful for the chance I had to watch this guy walking around within 20 or 30 yards for as long as he did. My encounter with him taught me some practical lessons. The bitter regret in my heart for a rare opportunity squandered is only slightly eased by the recognition that when faced with the tough ethical decision about whether or not to take a low-percentage shot, I came down on the right side of the decision.
I know that as time goes by, I’ll replay the events of this morning many times in my memory. I know that on many days, I’ll tell myself that I should have taken the shot through the branches.
I’ve made those sorts of bad decisions in my life, and I know the taste of the guilt and remorse the seeps out of the memory forever. On those days when I convince myself that I should have taken the risky shot, I’ll be only slightly comforted in the knowledge that it’s a regret that’s a lot easier to swallow and taste than the regret of a poor decision gone bad.
